The Queen's Cadet, and Other Tales
1874
A haunting collection from the twilight of the Victorian era, where memory bleeds into the supernatural and love becomes indistinguishable from fate. The opening tale follows Jack Arkley, a Queen's cadet at Sandhurst, whose nostalgic recollections of childhood in Wales take a dark turn when he encounters a mysterious girl named Eve during a mountain excursion. After saving her from certain death, he discovers an unsettling truth: she is his cousin, bound to him by blood and, it seems, by something far more ominous. When Jack's military service takes him to India, spectral apparitions linked to Eve begin to haunt him, suggesting that their bond transcends the living world. Other tales in this collection sweep across Europe, from the courts of Russia to the coffee houses of Covent Garden, following figures like Cécile, a Georgian beauty whisked from the Ottoman Empire and presented to tsars and popes. Grant weaves these stories with Gothic unease and Victorian sentiment, exploring how the past reverberates through the present, how love persists beyond death, and how memory itself can become a kind of haunting. The prose carries the melancholy weight of things lost and the trembling fear of things unseen.
